


Left My Heart

by Ayes



Category: Twilight RPF
Genre: F/M, Mutual Pining, San Francisco, Stubborn Kristen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-23
Updated: 2017-10-23
Packaged: 2019-01-22 03:05:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12472056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ayes/pseuds/Ayes
Summary: It's been four months since she Liked a photo of his on Facebook, and he hates that he knows that.(Not to be confused with the incredible Harry/Draco fic by Emma Grant.)





	Left My Heart

Kristen rents an apartment above a pizza place in San Francisco. Every apartment in San Francisco seems to be above a pizza place, or a liquor store, and she's surprised by how often she sees the same people on her block in a city of millions.  
  
Rob has moved back home; his career is doing well enough that he gets flown to locations when he feels like leaving again. He doesn't audition anymore, she hears; she's glad there will be no more kisses on beds.  
  
They don't talk, though. Making it through four movies was like a camera-filled war and they can't look in each other's eyes without seeing the scars those years left them with.  
  
She can't complain. She has a new boyfriend named Jonny, who works at a different pizza place and plays the guitar. His eyes are green but she doesn't much appreciate it, having long ago given her preference to blue. He's willing to go to Halloween parties in couples costumes and she hates him for it, but no one's ever gonna be Rob again, so she tries to be happy.  
  
Tries.  
  
The weed in Northern California is amazing, grown in Humbolt and smoked on the streets. She goes to the drum circles in Golden Gate Park, throwing herself into them when she's high enough, and has her beanie on. She goes to the Folsom Street Fair, kisses the cheeks of gay men in leather in the sun. She takes pictures of her life, and doesn't show them to anybody.  
  
There's an acting class in the Mission that Jonny drops her off at between deliveries. She's living under her means, but means don't matter when you move away and try to figure yourself out. At 22, she doesn't much care for bars, and she hates the mall, so she spends a lot of time indoors, or at Jonny's house under his warm, heavy swap meet blankets. He thinks he loves her, but he doesn't. He thinks she comes every time they slip under the blankets, but she doesn't. He thinks and she doesn't. It's not life but it's living.  
  
Sometimes she walks sixteen blocks to his house at six in the morning and he lets her chainsmoke on his fire escape, he listens when she frets about her monologues and mysterious bruises. She hasn't figured out what he wants from her yet, but the possibility that he wants her, exactly how she is, is terrifying. She thinks they might get married one day, only because she can't see out of the path that she's on and it goes straight down a slow incline for miles.  
  
+++  
  
Rob stares at the rearview mirror until the lanes of traffic behind him blend into stars. It's dangerous to drive in London at night, but it's his greatest thrill to weave through the streets and out of the city. He thinks he'd have been a good taxi driver, but long silences drive him crazy. Especially not talking to her.  
  
It's been four months since she Liked a photo of his on Facebook, and he hates that he knows that. He obsesses over memories at the times when his mind slips into distracted. Give himself a moment on a stairwell, rooting through his pockets, and he'd find that he was thinking about the curve of her lip far before his fingers touched gum.  
  
Robert still thinks of his life as before he got famous and, more importantly, After Kristen. He's still in an After, like his whole life now is a post period to the one important thing that has ever happened to him. He's withering and changing and trying to hold on to stale time, the way things were. But he gave up holding on to her over a year ago, finally let her chase him away and told himself the world was saner.  
  
Maybe it is. He certainly feels less sane than everyone else. He calls her on a Sunday and lets it ring all the way through to her answering machine. _Hi, it's Kristen, sorry I missed your call. Leave a message...._  
  
He doesn't.  
  
+++  
  
Pop Quiz. You are: Kristen Stewart.  
  
Do you A. ignore Robert Pattinson's perfectly respectable  2PM Sunday phone call;  
B. dye your hair ash brown but fuck up on the ends; or  
C. buy Subway and two packs of cigarettes and consume them in Dolores Park.  
  
The answer, if you are really Kristen Stewart right now, is D. All of the Above. There's no reason for Rob to be calling her. She twirls her crappy brown hair around her fingers as she smokes, stretching her feet out in front of her in the grass. Maybe he'll call back. Maybe he'll call back and leave a message and something terrible or super boring will have happened and it has nothing to do with him missing her.  
  
She doesn't even know that he misses her; she just misses him. Jonny wouldn't understand and so she doesn't tell him. He thinks she keeps her press clippings but she's just cutting recent photographs of Rob out like every preteen girl in America, and then throwing them away the next time she sees them in shame.  
  
Her acting class is putting on Romeo and Juliet, and Kristen didn't get the lead. She knows why; she can't play Juliet, not now, and it's blindingly obvious that that kind of love is either lost to her or somewhere she can't get it.  
  
So she doesn't call him back, but she smokes half her first pack, and wants to.  
  
+++  
  
One month passes. Robert goes to Los Angeles to draft contracts and have his hair cut short. He's playing a Marine in a period movie, a war movie. It's going to be a hit and they aren't even filming yet. That's what they tell him as he signs papers, his beanie making his ears too warm.  
  
Kristen is in town. Somehow he is aware of this without trying to learn. It's her brother's birthday and she's come back to town, without her boyfriend. The fact that she has a boyfriend hasn't sunk in for him yet; but then, she always has seemed to have one, or be getting rid of one, or refusing to let him be one himself. This is a girl who wants to be free but not single. Rob sighs. He doesn't think that he'll see her. He'd like to, but that doesn't matter.  
  
They'd _tried_. You couldn't say they hadn't. Some time after they stopped denying being a couple, they stopped denying that they wanted to be. They'd made their last two movies together, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn, and a documentary after that. Once the Twilight Saga didn't own anything but photos of them, they'd moved to Venice Beach and tried to be happy. They'd fucked and smoked weed and smiled till their lips cracked when the photographers happened upon them fighting.  
  
They'd fallen into love. Just a little. Just enough to mend the small fights, just enough to make grand promises of forever. Not enough to keep them, or keep from fighting, and then both of them had slipped and he doesn't remember if one of them cheated, or both of them did, or if they just accused each other so loudly that it didn't matter. She'd called the cops and he had listened to her describing him perfectly before reaching out and breaking her phone. They fell all the way in love, and broke up that week.  
  
+++  
  
She spends a satisfying four days with her family and friends. She goes to the beach and has her nails done with her mother, has sushi with her siblings, takes a nap on the roof.  
  
She finds the room at the Chateau Marmont that he is using for interviews. All she does is have her publicist call and bully her magical way into some information, but the next day it's on all the blogs that they're reuniting.  
  
And they're not. She doesn't go over but the problem with being who they happen to be is that he's going to know by  tomorrow that she asked.  
  
Kristen flies back into San Francisco International.  
  
+++  
  
Rob has always been the kind of guy who chases impossible things. Acting, for one, is something he is still surprised to have found success in. And for two there is Kristen, although she's mostly always just been improbable.  
  
He learns quickly that she's fled, but then, she always liked to be chased. He has no idea if this has changed and no way of knowing. It takes a full morning of talking himself into it, but he follows her back home with no plan in mind and ends up at the SFO luggage claim with one bag and one guitar.  
  
+++  
  
Kristen doesn't break up with Jonny because of Rob. Ending things is the right thing to do because she knows that she doesn't return what she sees in his face every time their line of eyesight meets. So she breaks up with Jonny, and it's not because of Rob. She's fucked up enough to watch Jonny's eyes cloud up and his mouth shape Why, Kristen, before she realizes she isn't even listening to the sounds, and she's fucked up because she thinks that this is saving him.  
  
Of course Rob is waiting for her when she's done walking home.  
  
Kristen pushes past him when he tries to intercept her, not looking into his face because _that's_ where all the danger is. He shrugs and follows her, all the way up to her room and then into her kitchen, where he stands in the doorframe and she turns to face his shoulder.  
  
"Your timing is fucking perfect." Like he planned it. Or like she knew he was coming.  
  
He moves a little closer, leans against the wall nearest her. His eyes betray nothing but his shoulders are held more hunched than average. "Is it?" he asks mildly, sounding very British and kind of perfect.  
  
Kristen nods and tugs the sleeves of her sweatshirt over her hands. "It's been a long time since I've seen you."  
  
"I know."  
  
His voice is weird to hear again, and it cuts into her so deeply that she can't hear what he's saying rationally. Now he is trying to explain, or talk, or come up with excuses and promises or something that she is only half focused on because she already knows how this conversation is about to end. He stops talking and looks at her.  
  
"I don't need you," she says, wanting to say it, before they crash into each other, and he says nothing at all.


End file.
